ANDERS MAGE PAGE 2.0

Justin Cayce felt weightless as he noticed he was upside down. He couldn't say that he much cared for it. The sound of metal screaming as it tore filled his senses and a calm corner of his mind connected the noise to the notion that John Patterson's beloved jaguar was rolling over as it prepared to stop well before the intended destination. They had plowed into a mailbox.

"Stanzi. John. Are you ok?"

There was no answer. "Hey! Wake up, guys. The men in black will be here any second."

A low moaning marked Constanzi's position. Still no answer from Patterson. Not good.

"Stanzi. Stanzi, wake up!"

"Uhh... John, you stupid pendaho. Ow!"

"Stanzi!"

"Justin? Madre de dios, Justin! John's hurt!"

An icy calm that Justin only felt in the thick of combat settled over him. Unconsciously his hand strayed to his knife hilt.

"Is he conscious?"

"No."

"Damn. He's the only one of us with healing magick. Is your laptop ok? Is it running?"

"Yes."

"Find me a hospital." A car door slammed. A pair of black wingtips approached. "And hurry."

The hallway floor was very cool and invitingly stable. Constanzi considered passing out on it. Her vision was a bit blurry and head was clanging but even so her adrenaline wrenched her into an upright position. Justin was already up and running.

"You! I've got a trauma case outside and I need a gurney and a crash cart — stat!"

"Are you a doctor?"

"Question me later, rookie! This guy has multiple chest fractures. Jump!"

Orderlies started moving in every direction. Stanzi was amazed. With a practiced and precise grace they moved John into the E.R. and began ministering to him. Justin was in a corner putting on a pair of rubber gloves.

"Are you nuts?" she whispered as she approached. "You don't know anything about medicine."

Justin looked up at her with a stranger's eyes. "You're right. Justin doesn't know anything about medicine. Now get out of my way and let me work."

---

There is a little known and little used background in Mage called Dream. You've heard of it but have you ever used it? Perhaps you have but have you really thought about it? Like all ill-defined things, it is more than ripe for abuse. Here, in a nutshell, is a nuts and bolts guide to a poorly understood game mechanic.

The Collective Unconscious

There are theories. Of course, as long as we have experts and mages we are always going to have theories. Among Tradition mages it tends to go like this:

There is this deep place within the vast collective unconscious wherein all knowledge great and small resides. It finds its expression in the lives of spirits and mortals. Some call it the Maya, some call it the dreamtime. Only those who can reach this place with their mind and touch it with their spirit may petition it for the knowledge it holds. Because it resides deep within all things it can and does act through many agents and in some cases will act in a completely unpredictable manner. Yet it will always nourish those who seek to know.
a purposefully anonymous Dreamspeaker

In some form or another, this is basically what most Tradition mages teach their pupils who possess this weird-even-for-a-mage ability. With some variations of course.

Euthanatos, Verbena, Akashics, Dreamspeakers, Cultists of Ecstasy and most Hermetics subscribe to the notion above.

Celestial Choristers, enochian Hermetics, Khabalistic Hermetics and Batini mages tend to view the process as the will of the divine working through the individual. This, they say, is why you sometimes get weird results. There may be some truth to this theory as well.

Technomages, who as a rule do not consider the collective unconscious sentient and don't believe in God, seek to explain the phenomenon itself. Virtual Adepts, Etherites and some Void engineers call this "comparative processing". The basic reasoning is this: by comparing a situation or problem to every piece of data in my mind and looking for patterns and similarities, I can find solutions of which I have no direct knowledge or experience. While this reasoning might seem specious, I can tell you from experience that it does work in a limited way. I am an absolute machine at any form of standardized testing because of it. Although, it is a stretch to say that because someone can repair an outboard motor they ought to be able to perform thoracic surgery. In some cases technomages fall back on the idea that all principles and axioms are the same and that gives them the paradigm nudge they need. Progenitors have even posited the theory that the proteins that make up our D.N.A. have an unknown capacity for information, that past life experiences are made up from bits and pieces of ancestor memory and that each human being potentially carries the sum of the knowledge of his family tree. This theory has yet to be tested. Of the Conventions, Iteration X eschews all theorizing on the subject as the Computer seeks to become a Collective Conscious... Iterators with dream as a background are very rare and are usually considered a wild element.

The Nephandi take a typically inverted view of the collective unconscious. They say the knowledge that they receive is from Oblivion which contains all the knowledge that has ever been lost. While some Euthanatoi and some Dreamspeakers are fascinated by the idea, they still subscribe to an active rather than passive force in the cosmos.

No one really knows what the Maruaders think about the subject but it is a known fact that Dream comes frighteningly easy to them. There are few who do not have it.

The Real Story

If you have The Book of Worlds you already know a few things about the Maya and the astral realms. When a mage accesses his Dream ability he is basically manipulating the underlying structure of the Maya as it relates to him. Naturally, he does this both consciously and unconsciously as it takes an effort of will to achieve but he has no idea how he is doing it or why it chooses to manifest as it does.

As has been noted in other places, sometimes a dreaming mage will ask for one thing and get something else which may or may not help. Because of the fluid nature of the Maya, and because of the power of the mage's Avatar, the Maya must respond but it may respond with whatever tools it has to hand. This usually depends on the specificity of the requested knowledge.

• A desperate mage reaches out with his mind for enough Brawl knowledge to keep from getting killed. Nearly every person on Earth has been in a fight or two so the knowledge leaps into the mind of the mage and he gets to walk out instead of being carried out.
• A mage who cannot read Babylonian finds that he must decipher a clay tablet. He calls on Dream and finds that a linguistic spirit arrives and gives him the knowledge he seeks.
• A mage who seeks knowledge about a particular vampire finds that he is channeling an 18th century witch hunter. This kind of knowledge borrowing can get very nasty very quick.

Mage and Spirits and Wraiths (Oh my!)

The Maya may work through these disparate beings because they share one thing in common: they sleep and they dream... Occasionally spirits and wraiths must deal with a phenomenon called "Yanking". It has even been posited that mages who go into Quiet are being Yanked themselves. As it happens, mages with a high Dream score can sometimes make friends with the entities from whom they are borrowing knowledge or they can make bitter enemies out of them. In almost all cases, when a spirit or wraith manifests they are completely unaware of the mage and unless the mage has Spirit magick and knows what to look for he will generally be unaware of what is going on too. Awareness of the spirit usually means that the mage has at least Spirit 1 and notices that his own aura has taken on a few different colors. It should be noted that working Spirit magick on a spirit while you are using Dream to channel it is usually considered an attack. It will awaken the spirit in question who will usually be as mad as a wet chicken. Prime magick also has a small chance to awaken them but this is usually much gentler. Spirits like quintessence and awakening to the movement of quintessence can at times put them in a good mood.

Benefits of Dream

An easy way to pick up common lore

The example above is a good way to illustrate how useful Dream can be in an emergency. However, Dream has other, simpler, uses. It is a good way for mages to pick up languages. Not just regular languages but those of the Romani, the howling and barking of Garou, the languages of computers and in some cases, languages even more esoteric. It's an excellent way for an Etherite Scientist to pick up a scientific discipline that he is unfamiliar with for fast use or long research that verges into unfamiliar territory.

Another good use for this ability is to do research. Here's an example. A Virtual Adept wants to know about vampires. He takes a few days of staying at home and using Dream to channel information about vampires, and then writing it all down on the old laptop. While the knowledge of Vampire Lore fades every night, the data itself does not. As the character encounters more vampires his knowledge of them becomes more complete and fills in some blanks and inaccuracies. He has a ready made library of information that he can draw on and sooner or later that information starts to impress itself on the conscious mind as well. In this way, a player can either choose for the character to halve the cost of the talent, skill or knowledge or he can choose to spend the full points on it, all at once, up to the limit of the Dream score.

While Dream is an excellent way to pick up knowledges, it is also good for picking up skills and abilities of a physical nature. This has unique advantages but also unique disadvantages. Channeling Brawl is easy but channeling ballet dancing is not. Channeling guitar is simplicity itself for someone who already plays another instrument and while the technical moves might still remain in the memory, the muscle memory does not. This is why, whenever channeling a strenuous physical activity, a mage must make a Stamina roll against difficulty 8. Only one success is required. Failure on this roll might mean a cramp or lingering stiffness, perhaps even a sprain.

A botch on this roll might result in torn ligaments or something broken. While it might seem risky to use this ability some Akashics and Euthanatoi swear by this method. In their hands, an unfamiliar weapon or some found object becomes deadly.

Recovery of lost lore

Among mages this is known as "knowledge dowsing". While this is an invaluable tool to some mages it is not without its perils as I'll explain below. At times this ability can be used to unearth lost languages, lost history or even lost geography(!). There have been some cases of people channeling dead people and writing symphonies while under the influence of "automatic writing". Most mages write these episodes off as a wraith ability called skinriding but this is not always the case.

Past life contact

There have been cases of mages channeling an ability and finding it surprisingly easy. Along with the ability come memories from another person who lived long ago. Some claim the mage is connecting to one of their own past lives. Others use it as proof that a mage's Avatar is an aged spirit that connects to different mages over its long existence.

As any Storyteller who reads this will realize, this is not always a good thing. While Euthanatos, Verbena and Akashic mages seem to have less problems in that respect even they are not immune and any widderslainte who peers back into their other lives is in for a horrifying ride. Sons of Ether and Virtual Adepts sometimes have to battle these other identities to maintain their wellbeing and their place in their Tradition. This is basically a door that the Storyteller may choose to open at any time and in some ways it can be very good or bad for the character. At times solving old past life conflicts can help with the struggle for Arete or it can help psychological problems disappear. It can also be an invitation for the former life to shanghai the present one. Be warned.

Perils of Dream

Susceptibility to outside influences

When a mage opens himself to Dream he is essentially dropping most of his spiritual defenses to act as an antenna for whatever the Maya sends. Some entities know this or can sense it. For this reason and this reason only it is unwise to attempt to use Dream near a nihil or a severely Wyrm-infested area. When a mage uses Dream, his ability to fight off external possession is reduced by 2 for the purposes of resisting Puppetry, Domination or Possession charms of spirits or other forms of coercion. The only exception to this is Mind magick. The Dream user's spiritual defenses may be dropped but this does not mean that his mental shields are weakened. However, this can be circumvented with Spirit magick and/or some spiritual help.

Mages with a dream score of 4 or above find their auric fields are particularly thin. As such, they often have a permanent -1 for resistance even when not using their Dream score. When they use it, they are also subjected to the -2 penalty.

Specificity breeds problems

One thing to which most mages who have studied this phenomenon can readily attest is the more specific the knowledge sought, the more problems can arise. Mages who suppose that Dream is an easy road to lost lore often end up in extended Quiets.

Let me give a few examples. Lets say that your mage wants to channel Chinese. Since there are billions of people who speak Chinese, this language just drops into his mind and he can speak it like a native.

Lets say that this same mage need to decipher something written in ancient Mayan. Since this knowledge is known by perhaps a hundred living people, the mage is most likely to be contacted by a deceased Mayan or a linguistic epiphling. The mage may take on certain elements of that spirit's personality for the duration — and sometimes beyond.

Lets say the mage wants to decipher a strange stone tablet with old glyph that predates mankind. Since no human ever knew that language, the Maya channels something that did... The mage screams "Purple hairy SPIDERS!", drives his fingers into his eyes and then starts tearing Doissetep's Keep apart stone by stone...

You run into the same problems with knowledge as it becomes more personal. Lets return to the example of the Virtual Adept who wants to know about vampires. If he just wants to know general vampire lore he's liable to get it free. If he wants to know about the vampires of a particular place or group he might end up channeling the City Father Totem of that city or he might "Yank" some spirit that has links to the group. In the case of Giovanni or Samedi this will always be a ghost. In the case of thaumaturgically adept vampires, some other type of spirit might be yielded. In some cases the knowledge might come from the sleeping mind of a ghoul close to the group or Clan. This can be a disaster if the sleeping ghoul is from one of the Sabbat ghoul families as many of them are thoroughly bent if not outright insane.

If the Virtual Adept wants to know information about one particular vampire he definitely runs the risk of channeling someone slain by that vampires and maddened by years or decades of frustration. Worse, if the vampire has Necromancy as a discipline, word may get back to him. The mage might even be unwittingly influenced by the necromancer through the wraith (are you frightened yet?).

The Oneira

Some of the dream lords have a vested interest in certain types of knowledge. While channeling mages do not have an effect on the Maya itself, some of the Oneira take a keen interest in the kinds of knowledge that goes out, especially if it is part of their particular bailiwick. One Oneira was known to hunt a particular mage for stealing lost stories from the Maya. The Oneira sometimes take notice of the antics of particular mages and ultimately it is an incredibly bad idea to annoy them as you have to sleep sometime.

It is rumored the Oneira also protect some knowledge from being accessed. The Akashic Record possesses a legend of a contingent of their members that traveled to the Maya and consulted an august being about the best way to keep the unworthy from learning the fundamentals of Do. The Oneira was offered a gift (what this was differs in versions of the legend) and in return the knowledge was sealed.

Apparently, this is an extremely rare procedure and their are only a bare half dozen things that are flatly not accessible by the use of Dream. Few even know what they are. Do is one. Knowledge of Iteration X's Computer root commands is another (no one can guess how they pulled this off). The lost spirits of the Bunyip, Croatan and the past lives of Silent Striders also remain lost in the mists of the Maya. No one knows who guards them.

---

Justin was tired as he stripped off the gloves. Constanzi had gotten a Verbena friend to prepare a few things and as soon as he was taken to his room they would minister to him and then get the hell out of there.

"Are you ok?" she queried. "You went a little weird there for a while."

"I got a surgeon who died a few years ago. He knew the hospital. He's still sort of in here."

Stanzi shivered. "Is that good or bad?"

"Well..." He grinned. "You see that cute nurse over there?"

"Yeah. So."

"Well, I plan to ask her out."

"Why?"

"Because I remember what she was like in bed. The doc did a good deed for John and now I'm going to do a good deed for him — and me."

"Pig."